St. Mary of the Plains College — The Sisters Built It Twice; the Emptying Plains Unmade It

Summary

St. Mary of the Plains College, in Dodge City, Kansas — opened by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Wichita in September 1952 and a four-year institution by 1954 — closed at the end of the 1991–92 academic year: forty years old as a college, seventy-nine as a school, and western Kansas's only Catholic college. It did not die of scandal or a predator's contract. It died of arithmetic: a small, tuition-dependent liberal-arts college with no large endowment, drawing students from a quarter of Kansas that had been losing people for two decades, in an era of leaner federal aid and — by one accounting — roughly $10 million in defaulted-student-loan exposure. When the numbers stopped computing, the congregation that had built the campus twice accepted the verdict and shut the doors.

The 1952 date understates how much dying and rebuilding the place had already survived. Its genealogy runs from Soule College — a failed 1888 venture whose empty buildings Bishop John J. Hennessy of Wichita bought in 1912 for $8,500, recruiting the reluctant Sisters by telegram — through the academy they opened in 1913, to the evening of May 10, 1942, when a tornado leveled the campus hours after students formed a living rosary on the lawn. No one was killed; wartime restrictions forbade rebuilding; the Sisters spent a decade fundraising and built the school again on Dodge City's north side. The college that opened in 1952 was four-year by 1954, accredited in 1963, and by the late 1960s enjoying the golden age the Sisters had been promised: four new dormitories, enrollment climbing from roughly 500 toward 800, Cavaliers in the Kansas Collegiate Athletic Conference, singers touring Latin America, and more than 6,000 alumni — nurses, teachers, business graduates — staffing the towns of southwest Kansas.

Then the towns themselves began to thin. Rural depopulation in the 1970s and 1980s drained the college's catchment; enrollment slid, deficits compounded, and no endowment existed to absorb them. The end, when it came in 1992, was quiet and almost orderly — student records entrusted to Kansas Wesleyan University, the campus leased and later sold to the city, and Newman University of Wichita opening a western Kansas center in Hennessy Hall that same year, so that the building the Sisters raised from a tornado's wreckage has never quite stopped teaching.

Timeline

Bought for $8,500, Built Twice

Every chapter of the institution's life began with somebody else's failure or disaster, met by the stubbornness of a religious congregation. The campus itself was a ruin of frontier optimism: Soule College, built in 1888 during Dodge City's first boom, passed from Presbyterian to Methodist hands and died young, its buildings sitting vacant until Bishop Hennessy bought the property in 1912 for $8,500. The school he wanted required the Sisters of St. Joseph of Wichita, and the Sisters required convincing — Mother Aloysia Keleher's hesitation about planting a boarding academy in so thin a country was the most prescient financial analysis the institution ever received. The bishop's telegram won the argument. From 1913 the academy taught its thirty, then hundreds, of pupils through drought years and the Depression.

What ended the academy was not enrollment but weather. On May 10, 1942 — a Sunday given to sodality devotions, the students having formed a living rosary around the statue of Our Lady of the Plains that afternoon — a tornado struck at 7:45 p.m. and left the buildings beyond repair. That no one died was counted a miracle; that nothing could be rebuilt was simple wartime fact. The Dodge City Daily Globe wrote the school an obituary with a clause of hope, trusting "the recording angel" would note the Sisters' sacrifice and usher in "a new and better foundation." The Sisters took the clause literally. In the late 1940s Mother Mary Anne McNamara and Sister Linus Gleason revived the plans and enlarged them — not an academy this time, but a college for southwest Kansas. When an architect laughed in 1950 that plans could hardly be ready for a 1952 opening, Sister Linus corrected him: "No, we are going to start school in 1952." They did — in a Hennessy Hall finished around its first students, with a marble chapel whose communion rail was the gift of the destroyed academy's alumnae.

The college that followed was the golden age the Sisters had been promised in 1942. Four-year by 1954, accredited in 1963, it assembled the full apparatus of a midcentury Catholic college: theology and philosophy required of every student; programs in nursing, elementary education, and business administration; drama staging four productions a year; the Campanile Singers touring Latin America in 1965. The high school closed in 1968 — a sign of strength; the college needed the room — and four dormitories and the Sheridan Activity Center rose between 1965 and 1969 as enrollment climbed from about 500 toward its peak near 800. The Cavaliers competed in the KCAC and sent Gerald Govan and Don Dee to professional basketball. For a city remembered nationally for Wyatt Earp and cattle drives, St. Mary of the Plains was the quiet counter-fact: Dodge City had a four-year college, and the Sisters had built it twice.

When the Plains Emptied

The college's fatal exposure was geographic, and it was visible from the beginning — Mother Aloysia had named it in 1912. St. Mary of the Plains drew its students overwhelmingly from the farm and ranch counties around it, and in the 1970s those counties began a long demographic retreat: farms consolidated, young people left for Wichita and beyond, and the small towns that had sent the college their graduates sent fewer each year. A national university can recruit around a shrinking region; a small Catholic college whose identity, governance, and recruiting all lived in southwest Kansas could only watch its pipeline narrow.

The financial mechanics followed with textbook cruelty. Enrollment that had crested near 800 receded through the 1970s and 1980s, and because the college was tuition-dependent — the Sisters' sacrifice had built buildings, not an endowment — every lost student came straight out of the operating budget, and deficits accumulated. Federal aid, the lifeline of low-income rural students, grew tighter through the 1980s, and the college's exposure to defaulted loans — roughly $10 million by one published accounting — turned the federal partnership from cushion into threat. Dr. Michael McCarthy's fifteen-year presidency held the institution together through the leanest stretch; his successor, Dr. Bernard Parker, arrived in 1990 to books that no longer offered a path. There was no scandal and no villain — only a college built for a region that was, by the measure that mattered most, disappearing around it.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The students dispersed to finish their degrees elsewhere, and the college's 6,000-plus alumni became a diaspora — their association still keeps an office in Hennessy Hall, on the campus where the college used to be. Kansas Wesleyan University in Salina became the custodian of academic records, and in 2021 went further, announcing a 50-percent tuition scholarship for children and grandchildren of alumni — a kindness extended across a 29-year gap, from one small Kansas church college to the memory of another. On July 23, 2022, the city dedicated a Wall of Fame to those 1988–91 football teams, whose championships — as the mayor put it — "were never recognized," because the college closed beneath them.

The campus had the rarest afterlife in this file: a useful one. The city leased, then bought, the 82 acres from the Sisters in the mid-1990s and put the buildings to civic work — the Sheridan Activity Center became the Parks and Recreation Department's home, Cavalier Field passed to Dodge City Community College's teams, a dormitory was converted into a motel, and Hennessy Hall, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004, today houses Newman University's Western Kansas Center. What was lost is the thing no reuse can replace: a four-year college's payroll, its faculty, and the promise that a ranch kid in southwest Kansas could earn a Catholic liberal-arts degree without leaving home.

Lessons

References

• St. Mary of the Plains: A Centennial Tribute Southwest Kansas Register (Catholic Diocese of Dodge City)
• St. Mary of the Plains College Lost Colleges
• KWU Announces Scholarship for Families of St. Mary of the Plains College Alumni Kansas Wesleyan University
• Western Kansas — Newman University Newman University
• St. Mary of the Plains College Wikipedia